The Baltimore Police Monitoring Team oversees the implementation of a Consent Decree—a judicially-enforceable agreement—between the City of Baltimore and the United States. The Consent Decree requires the Baltimore City Police Department to adopt a number of specific reforms aimed at ensuring effective, safe, and constitutional policing.

Following an investigation that began in 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) found reasonable cause to believe that the Baltimore City Police Department (BPD) was engaged in a pattern or practice of constitutional violations, which allegedly included making unconstitutional stops, searches, and arrests; using enforcement strategies that produced severe, unjustified disparities in stops, searches, and arrests of African-Americans; using excessive force; and retaliating against people engaging in constitutionally-protected expression. In the wake of DOJ’s findings, the City of Baltimore and the United States Department of Justice entered into an agreement, known as a Consent Decree, that requires the BPD to make a number of fundamental changes to its policies, training, practices, use of data, and more.

On April 7, 2017, United States District Court Judge James K. Bredar entered the Consent Decree as his own order. As a result, Judge Bredar now oversees implementation of the Consent Decree, ensuring that the City of Baltimore and BPD do what the Consent Decree requires.

The Consent Decree requires appointment of an Independent Monitor and Monitoring Team to serve as the agents of the Court in overseeing the implementation of the Consent Decree. On October 3, 2017, Judge Bredar appointed Kenneth Thompson to be the Monitor, together with a team of experts in policing and police reform, civil rights enforcement, psychology, social science, organizational change, data and technology, and community engagement.